February 2012

In a centuries-old French church high on a hill, Malian-style finger-picked guitar riffs bounced off cabaret-ready piano lines. Whispering calabash brushed against shimmering minimal techno. All in service of a dreamy set of songs that became E Volo Love, tracks that straddle the catchiest of indie rock and electronica and the lush borders of globally inflected experimentation.

This is the world of Fránçois and the Atlas Mountains. Fránçois has opened for incandescent Afrobeat scion Femi Kuti, and he has played with effusive retro-rockers Camera Obscura. He’s leaped unexpectedly onto the indie scene in an English industrial town and learned to embrace the sounds of his native Southwestern France. He’s gotten lost in the outskirts of Fez and dug into the complexities of Senegalese mbalax’s rolling club beats.

Shaped by the quiet influence of West and North African sounds and by the gritty yet friendly vibe of Bristol’s underground arts scene, Fránçois and the Atlas Mountains make a return to roots—hometowns, lost loves, Western pop transformed in the crucibles of the Sahara or Dakar—utterly engaging and fresh.

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Fránçois was raised on Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Prévert, the classics of French pop and poetry. He also grew up hearing tales from Cameroon, where his mother spent her girlhood. Yet the rural French kid’s mind was blown when he first heard grunge and pounded on a distortion pedal, and he started making his own tapes.

When work took him to Bristol, England, Fránçois immediately jumped into a thriving scene, one that included both the speed-of-weed trip hop of groups like Portishead and Massive Attack, and a DIY-loving arts underground where experimentation and collaboration were welcome. Fránçois, merrily collecting a menagerie of instruments and accompanying himself live on keys he played with his feet, fit in perfectly and soon connected with bands from The Pastels to Movietone to Camera Obscura, who invited him to join.

Yet there are other currents that run through Fránçois’s music and that flow across North and West Africa, back to Europe. Things clicked for Fránçois when he heard the brilliant African blues of Ali Farka Touré and the gritty Sahara rock of Tinariwen. He found himself wandering through Morocco, shadowing groups of Senegalese drummers, trying to master the polyrhythmic spree of Dakar’s dance music (mbalax, made famous by singers like Youssou NDour).

On E Volo Love, these fascinations get folded back into indie rock and electronica in an organic way. Inspired by Touré—and constantly mislaying his picks— Fránçois figured out how to touch the electric guitar strings and approach the bare fingered, rippling sound of Mali’s guitar greats. He invited Tinariwen engineer Jean-Paul Romann to add his imprint to the album.

And almost accidentally, E Volo Love gained an African pulse. As Fránçois was spending some time in his hometown of Saintes, he wound up playing a gig at the old church where the album was eventually recorded, with versatile drummer Amaury Ranger. A dance class had left behind a hand drum and a calabash, and the duo picked them up spontaneously during the show.

“The sound had a power and drive, but was gentle enough not to overwhelm what I was doing,” explains Fránçois. This sound, rich with the church’s natural resonance, blends seamlessly with the drum kit and beats of tracks like the album’s otherworldly opener, “Les Plus Beaux.”

“As we were putting the album together, the idea of return, of palindromes, kept popping up, which was perfect because I recorded the album where I grew up, around things I knew so well but was re-experiencing from the point of view of an adult,” Fránçois reflects. “It’s about things that never move, or things that return: sounds, people, feelings.”

Things that loop back transformed echo throughout E Volo Love, whether it’s the mysterious marimba sample from a field recording that merges into the bittersweet Afro-indie rock of “Edge of Town,” or the overwhelming nostalgia of the electronica-inflected “Bail Eternel.”

Opposites attract and coexist: a French cabaret piano line goes Congotronic on “Piscine,” horns add grit to a gentle indie ballad on “Azrou Tune.” The landscape on the cover looks like a blazing desert, but is actually a freezing morning: “The cover was shot at 7 AM in February on the coldest day you can get,” Fránçois recalls. “It has this strange feeling of things being the opposite at the same time.” Much like tension between airy and earthy that makes E Volo Love shine.

Russia’s Auktyon is a lost folklore ensemble darting behind an avant jazz collective, hidden inside a hugely popular rock band. It’s Animal Collective tangoing through the salon with The Art Ensemble of Chicago, nodding its Radiohead. A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

Here’s the real mystery: a gaggle of out-there bohemian musicians not only became stars at home, but managed to stay relevant in the minds and on the iPods of two post-Soviet generations. They rock a mean tuba. They have a dancer-declaimer who spouts sudden poetry, jerking and trembling like a holy madman.

But this is no under-the-radar cult group; it’s one of the biggest rock bands to burst from the Soviet collapse, with a defiant devil-may-care attitude and a keen sense for improvisation. This improv instinct led the band to Top, a wild, catchy spin through Auktyon’s magical paces. Recorded live at breakneck speed and with sheer joy, the album draws together the eerie folklore (“Shiski,” “Polden/Noon”), edgy urbanity (“Mimo,” “Yula/Top”), exuberant word play (“Homba”), and well-honed musicianship of a group uninterested in laurels or resting.

The band’s unflagging energy and ingenuity will be in full force February 11 2012 for a U.S. release party at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge and at Joe’s Pub on February 18. The band will be joined by long-time American collaborators, key whiz John Medeski and alt-guitarist Marc Ribot, for a special freewheeling show on February 16. Medeski and Ribot first leaped into Auktyon’s whirling songs several years ago, recording tracks for 2007’s Girls Sing, and playing shows together from Ukraine to downtown New York.

“We have never had the goal to do something special, or to get something particular across to people,” muses Auktyon dancer/poet Oleg Garkusha. “We do what we like, and we never do what we don’t want to do. We just play.”

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Auktyon’s first album came together as tanks stormed the legislative heart of Moscow. Yet the album (1994’s Ptiza), arguably a major landmark of Russian rock, rippled with a thoughtful happiness and bittersweet energy that mysteriously defied the madness erupting outside the studio. Perhaps because of that defiance, the curious mix of punk, reggae, klezmer, and a specific but elusive flavor of Russian creativity won the hearts of urbane listeners, turning the band into chart-topping pop darlings.

Things changed in Russia. Life stabilized. Rock stars of the Soviet underground got eccentric religion or got rich and arrogant. Not Auktyon: their live shows continued to be curious explorations, sparkling blasts of pure enjoyment. Fans packed their concerts, tearing the doors off the club that hosted their first U.S. appearance. They parsed and sang their untranslatable, playful lyrics. Though never political on or off the stage, Auktyon became a symbol of all that was progressive and possible in a country still in the throes of economic hardship, political struggle, and cultural upheaval.

Top rushes into this strange evolution, presenting both the essential sound and spirit that made listeners fall in love, and its continued musical maturation. Though they meticulously crafted a follow-up to their hit, the band decided to do something different: They sat together in a big room and started toying with compositions brought in by the band members, most notably Leonid Fedorov, guitarist, singer, and singular songwriter.

Then, eyes locked and ears open, they let things spin off in a new, wonderful direction. “Since we didn’t have any set compositions, it’s hard to define what was improvisation on the album and what wasn’t,” reflects Auktyon’s Nikolai Rubanov, who plays sax and horns. “Improvisation becomes possible when there’s an initial structure. If you don’t have that, then the very notion of improvisation gets fuzzy. Ours was a process of collective creation.” The songs sound fresh but finished: “Meteli” bounces with upbeat pop sensibility that belies the band’s jamming approach, and “Homba” surges forward with a gleeful momentum.

As part of this collective composition, words swim up—fragments of long-lost ballads, funny turns of phrase that suggest melodies—like a friend’s voice in the fog, setting the tempo and evoking entire worlds. “Take, for example, the song ‘Homba,’” Auktyon producer Sergei Vasiliev begins, discussing the lyrics to the fast-building song with echoes of both Jewish folk melodies and surf rock. “It has elements many other Russian authors have already played with: ‘woulda coulda shoulda…’ but then it flies off somewhere completely different, somewhere ideal in my opinion. The burden of meaning locked in the text doesn’t keep you on the ground. As you fly off, you get the maximum emotional impact.”

Alongside the texts, the band’s instruments fly in new directions, while Fedorov’s urgent guitar establishes an axis. Everything else—buzzing tuba mouthpieces, overblown flutes, creepy squeaks, and ethereal choruses—rotates around it. The spontaneity of the exploration is palpable, as is the band’s complete comfort crafting songs together, live.

In the middle of a rough year, Philly-based poet and spoken work artist Ursula Rucker opened an email that stretched back to the 16th century.

It was an out-of-the-blue invitation from strangers, from two producers she had never crossed paths with, working on an album of songs based on the poetry of Kabir, an Indian mystic and poet, and woven around the sublimely precise, stunningly earthy voice of renowned Hindustani classical singer Shubha Mudgal.

She listened, felt the common thread, and co-created No Stranger Here, a polyphonic, multifaceted tribute to love, earthly and divine. With Kabir as the binding tie, Rucker, Mudgal, and the Business-Class Refugees (led by veteran cross-cultural, genre-defying producers Patrick Sebag and Yotam Agam) render in lush sonic form the shared experience of alienation and longing.

Balancing the elegant subtleties of Indian classical tradition, Western orchestral music, rich bursts of electronica, and Rucker’s insistent words, No Stranger Here flows from the universal sense of strangerhood, that mysterious alienation that haunts both our contemporary lives and echoes in centuries-old poems. “None of us are strangers to that feeling,” remarks Sonya Mazumdar, EarthSync CEO and producer. “Yet it is the very feeling of not belonging that highlights the intensity of love.”

“We use silences a lot. The use of silences for punctuation is very important to what Kabir is saying,” notes Mudgal. “We really don’t know about him, what was actually written by Kabir and what was changed by his disciples. But by singing it today, we become part of a much longer continuum.”

Rucker agrees: “Just being a poet, no matter how many centuries separate you, is a connection. I use other elements, but my work is really about God and love, even if you have to dig and read between the lines. It’s a continuing thread that goes throughout time.”

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Kabir has the literary importance (and biographical mystery) of Shakespeare, but with an unrivaled spiritual significance, as part of the Bhakti (or “Devotion”) movement that pressed for spiritual renewal and broad human understanding for several centuries in India. Bhakti proponents eschewed the rigid ritualization of religion, raising a radical call for love and spirit beyond human-made boundaries. Kabir, as both thinker and figure, leaps nimbly across faiths, caste, cultures: Legend has it that Kabir was the son of Brahmins, but was raised by Muslim weavers. His spare, often blunt words have had a lasting impact on the Sikh faith and sparked a religious following that now numbers in the millions.

“Kabir is a major reference point for Indians. He had the ability to put these massive philosophical concepts in a way that the common person, who was denied education or had very simple ways for dealing with life, could grasp perfectly,” explains Mazumdar. “Kabir equated the love between two people to the love between an individual and God. Composers down the ages have interpreted his depth and simplicity in various musical formats.”

Mudgal, a renowned classical performer known for her openness to taking musical risks, continued this long tradition of innovation based on Kabir’s works. Invited into EarthSync’s Chennai studios for a session, Mudgal found herself drawing on poets of the Bhakti movement, and especially on Kabir, as she laid down tracks in response to Agam and Sebag’s grooves.

“Their tracks suggested a mood or tone, and I would look back on the poetry I’d been reading and take little bits from the poems,” Mudgal recalls. “Khayal, one of the styles I specialize in, uses phonetics to great advantage, and allows me to take a very tiny, 30-second composition and turn it into an extended exploration of pulse and sound. You can discover a lot as a musician, just in those few phrases.”

Agam, Sebag, and the rest of the Refugees—bassist Eval Mazig arranged the soaring orchestral parts—worked with Mudgal’s inspired improvisations—but realized that something was missing. Familiar with Rucker’s albums, they began dropping her voice onto a few tracks and realized she was it. Months of emails later, and Rucker, surprised by the invite and uplifted by its timing, crafted her own words and vocal tracks in response to Kabir and Mudgal’s.

Unexpected, the dialogue unfolds beautifully: “Steadfast” weaves the meditative perfection of Mudgal’s vocal lines with Rucker’s gentle yet firm explorations of love’s many angles. “Seraphim Tones” moves through intense longing to prayerful gratitude and connection, as Mudgal flies over scintillating beats and Rucker sings and speaks with an immediacy that shows just how alive the tie between ancient poems and contemporary poet can be.

To balance the Eastern elements and the Western orchestra, the distinctive voices of a highly trained singer and a veteran wordsmith, Agam and Sebag drew guidance from the narrative thread suggested by the pieces. “We look at it like a film that has two major actors that tell the same story but each from his place and environment,” they note. “Every song is a different story and should leave room for everyone to tell their stories in harmony. That's what music and collaboration is all about. That is what we love doing.”

Wildly creative guitarist meets musical soulmates and engaging new instruments in Mali—and records a stark yet warm dialogue as part of a close-knit, cross-cultural trio

In a warm Malian hotel room, the ngoni smiled.

A seemingly simple instrument with an evocative sound and deep past, it was both delighting and baffling the intrepid jazz and blues guitar maven from New York. Its tuning was open to interpretation, to the player’s feeling in the moment. The tonic sat square on the middle string, not at the bottom like most Western stringed instruments.

But as Leni Stern played this great-grandfather to the banjo, she knew she was in touch with something big. “I kept feeling I had the ultimate blues instrument in my hand,” Stern explains.

This ultimate blues buoys Sabani, a beautifully stripped down collection of graceful and dynamic instrumental lines, thoughtful songs, and catchy dialogue across traditions. Inspired by easygoing jam sessions with two Malian musician friends and recorded at Salif Keita’s Mouffou Studios in Bamako, Sabani brings the sound of every string, every pulseof the calabash and bounce of the talking drum to vivid life, to honor the intense and intimate connection Stern has developed with West African music over the last half-decade.

Stern and a trio of African master musicians—Kofo (talking drum, vocals), Alioune Faye (percussion), and Mamadou Ba (bass)—will share this sound with audiences on the West Coast and Midwest as part of their Spring 2012 tour. Cities include Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Cleveland, Albuquerque, and Phoenix.

“I don’t know why I waited so long to record this way,” Stern reﬂects. Stern—whose life has taken her from Munich to New York, from the Peruvian rainforests to the music school in Benin she helped found—was a veteran of the American and European avant rock, jazz, and singer-songwriter circuit.

Brought by UNESCO to mentor studio engineers in Mali, Stern was hooked. She began performing at seminal venues like the Festival in the Desert, touring with musicians from Keita to Baaba Maal, and, perhaps most importantly, making close friends with her newfound teachers and companions. She spent nearly two years living, learning, and making music across Africa.

Bassekou Kouyate, masterful player of the ngoni, and other members of his highly respected family showed Stern the instrumental ropes. Ami Sacko, a popular Malian singer often compared to Tina Turner, taught Stern songs and vocal approaches, while her brother Buba also helped Stern work on her ngoni chops. Stern became a member of the family, earning a new name (Oumou) and sharing the many adventures and trials the musicians encountered as they played for presidents or ﬂed collapsing festival stages.

It was playing alongside Kouyate at a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Malian independence, as one of 50 ngoni players honoring the occasion, that Stern was ﬁrst wowed by the deep and resonant ngoni ba, an encounter that sparked Stern’s ﬁrst ngoni-powered, blues-rich song, “Still Bleeding.”

Yet the most powerful moment that became Sabani, the spare follow up to Stern’s more lavishly arranged Africa-inspired work, was the feeling Stern savored as she jammed with friends from Keita’s band, string whiz Haruna Samake and artful percussionist Mamadou “Prince” Kone, who brings some of Mali’s lesser-known rhythms to the album.

Hanging around bus stations and airports, waiting for Keita, or meeting up in the evenings, the three friends often drank sugar-laden tea and made music together, blending their instruments and voices simply and organically.

This vibe bursts through on tracks like “Sorcerer,” which pairs Stern’s sharp, gritty, often eerie guitar with Samake’s round and percussive string work, and Stern’s Ricky Lee Jones-esque vocals with a warm, serpentine chorus in bambara Instrumentals like “An Saba” and “The Cat Who Stole the Moon” show both the virtuosity of crack players and the close listening of good friends, as contrasting yet harmonious melodies and timbres dance in dynamic interplay.

As the project came together in the relaxed atmosphere of Mouffou’s riverside studio, Stern also invited Sacko to sing (the bittersweet “Papillon”), and learned a thing or two from veteran sokou (folk ﬁddle) player and singer Zoumana Tareta. Tareta regaled the three friends with both wisdom earned from his life as a sought-after musician (by stars like Oumou Sangare, for example) and with the gripping vocal performance that graces “Djanfa.”

These experiences have transformed and deeply moved the seasoned Stern, filling her with a quiet, unexpected sense of coming home, a moody warmth that pervades Sabani.

“After all my time in Africa, all the musicians I’ve gotten to work with, I feel like a different guitarist, a different person, like I belong to the red earth and the warm winds and the people I love there,” Stern muses. ”I don’t think anyone can go and live there without changing profoundly. And we have a lot to learn from Africa.”